Across the Bloody Chasm: The Culture of Commemoration Among Civil War Veterans by M. Keith Harris (review)

In Across the Bloody Chasm: The Culture of Commemoration Among Civil War Veterans, M. Keith Harris explores how Civil War veterans remembered that awful conflict. Harris shows that most Union and Confederate veterans commemorated the Civil War in distinctly sectional ways. He contends that from the perspective of its veterans, the public memory of the Civil War was “a story of competition, negotiation, and contestation” (p. 4).

While most white Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries focused on reconciliation between the two sections, extolling the bravery and dedication of soldiers on both sides, veterans continued to fight the Civil War by other means, such as at monument dedications and in textbooks. Indeed, Harris shows that Civil War veterans rarely met with their former opponents to remember the conflict. Instead, they met with their former comrades, reinforcing their common beliefs.

Harris shows that Civil War veterans disputed everything from military tactics to the return of battle flags to Confederate units. They contested the treatment of prisoners of war and punitive measures taken against civilians. If Union veterans were outraged by the appalling conditions at Andersonville, then their Confederate counterparts bitterly resented William T. Sherman’s depredations in Georgia and the Carolinas. Union veterans sought to cover their cause in glory by reminding postbellum generations that they had fought for union and emancipation. Despite the fact that most Union army veterans were just as racist as typical white Americans, they gloried in the fact they had rid the United States of the curse of slavery. Union veterans asserted that slavery was the cause of the conflict and that Confederates had committed treason to defend that odious institution. Union veterans elevated emancipation, claiming that it was just as important to their cause as preservation of the Union. Of course, most white Union veterans could oppose slavery while still supporting racial inequality. Many Confederate veterans downplayed slavery as the cause of the war. Some flatly denied that they had fought to protect slavery, instead emphasizing defense of their homes and communities and vague but oppressive actions taken by the tyrannical North as the reasons for their noble bid for southern independence. Both Confederate and Union veterans claimed the mantle of the Founders and charged their adversaries with undermining the Union those worthies had established.

Harris complicates the picture of white supremacist postbellum reconciliation between the North and the South and Union and Confederate veterans offered by David W. Blight in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory(Cambridge, Mass., 2001). Blight contends that Americans in the early twentieth century conspicuously ignored slavery as a cause of the Civil War and emancipation as a war aim, giving the segregated nation a public memory of the war on southern terms, culminating in the fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg in 1913. Harris shows this was not the case for the war’s veterans. However, the strength of Across the Bloody Chasmis also its weakness. Harris’s focus on veterans tells us only how those select Americans remembered the Civil War. While they were respected, these ex-soldiers were far less influential than their children, who established the postwar consensus on sectional reconciliation.